“Just a little twinge every time my weight comes down on it, but even that is going away.”
“If you swim again today there’s the off-chance it’ll come back. But you’ll be okay tomorrow.”
“Is this far enough?” she asked. I nodded and we turned and headed back toward the bright spot of the towel far down the beach.
I was very conscious of her walking beside me, and I didn’t want to look at her. I’d had about all I could handle. I had kneaded that perfect golden texture of her, feeling the warmth and aliveness of the long flat muscles. It was all so vividly reminiscent of Judy that I felt too close to doing some wildly improbable, unpredictable thing. I had wanted to kiss the tender hollow behind her knee. The memory of the weight of her in my arms was too specific. I hated Maurice Weber for his ownership of this precious entity.
“I would not care to drown, thank you,” she said.
I should have made some comment in the same casual, bright vein, and I intended to, but when I opened my mouth I heard myself say, “My parents drowned in the Gulf when I was fifteen.”
“How horrible!”
“It was a long time before I could believe it had really happened. But people saw it. They were in my dad’s twenty-two foot open skiff. It had a sixty-five horse gray marine. They had to run outside from Stump Pass up to the Venice Jetty. He’d handled boats all his life but he made a miscalculation that time. A squall came out of the west. He was making a run for the jetty, hoping to make it before the high tide change. But when he got off the jetty the tide was beginning to run out, and there was one hell of a chop right off the mouth of the jetty. He should have beached it. He tried to run in and took a wave aboard that swamped the engine. It swung sideways in the chop and broached. It probably clipped my mother when it went over. There were people on the jetty, watching. Apparently he was making no attempt to save himself. They say he kept diving and diving, looking for her, as the tide kept carrying him further and further out. By the time they got out there with boats, he was gone for good. They found her, but they never found him.”
“Were there other children?”
“I was the only one.”
“What happened to you?”
“I had to move in with a bachelor uncle, a sour friendless mean son of a bitch. Excuse me.”
“That’s all right.”
“I was a pretty wild kid for a while. I guess I was trying to work my way into Raiford State Prison. But I got serious about football just in time.”
“It must be so odd to look at the Gulf and … think of that happening.”
“In the first few months I used to come over here onto the Key and just sit and look at it. I guess I made it into something with an intelligence of its own. It was evil. It laughed at me. I wanted to go out to the middle of it, halfway to Mexico and dive down and yank out the plug and let the damn thing run down into hell and explode into steam. Then I would find my father. But … one day it was just another piece of ocean, as enduring and impersonal as a mountain range. If you get careless it will kill you, just as a mountain will or a forest fire. But there is no intent.”
We had arrived back at the towel. She turned to face me in an almost formal way and said, “When you were fumbling around with that silly shell, I didn’t know how glad I was going to be that you’d hang around.”
“Any time.”
“And you haven’t acted … silly or slimy, and I don’t think you could, so I’m glad of that too.”
She was smiling. We looked into each other’s eyes. And in a fractional part of that moment, the relationship changed to something new. I don’t think she was expecting it any more than I was. It is that sudden rapport that goes so much further than words. It is a kind of recognition. In that curious instant, the other person becomes an obligatory part of your future. But even as I saw her smile fade and her mouth soften and her eyes take on a startled look, I wondered if this was the way she had looked at Charlie Haywood.
“I haven’t met anybody here,” she said.
“Not lately?”
“I don’t understand that—the way you say that. Are you angry?”
“Confused, I guess.”
“It doesn’t take long to get tired of sitting in there and looking at television?”
“Year after year?”
“You really aren’t married?”
We were entrapped there by each other’s eyes. There was a breathlessness in her voice. “I was once.”
“I’d go out with you if you’d ask me.”
“Why are you so anxious about whether I’m married?”
“Because I don’t think it would be smart—if you were.”
“But it’s okay if you are?”
“I’m not married!”
“You just live with the guy?”
“I live with a gray Persian cat. His name is Eerie. That’s because he watches things that aren’t there.”
“I am getting very very confused, Mrs. Weber.”
“Good Lord!” she said. “Oh, my goodness! I’m Peggy Varden! Char is my sister, my half-sister. And she’s nine years older than I am.”
The world dropped back into a pattern I could understand. I snapped my fingers. “You come from Richmond?”
“Yes. I got here yesterday. I was here last year for two weeks, but a little earlier in the summer.”
“And you’re not married?”
“I used to be. When I was a child. Peter died when I was twenty—that was five years ago.”
“I’m sorry I got so mixed up.”
She tried to glower at me. It was essentially too merry a face to make the expression very effective. “Do you have any distinguishing marks or characteristics? Like a name?”
“I’m handling everything damn well this morning. Sam Brice.”
“Sam Brice. Why should it be familiar, sort of?”
“It’s familiar, sort of, to only the most hardened addicts of pro football, Peggy. The ones who even learn the names of the linemen.”
“Hey!” she said. “Sure. Peter was wild about the game, and I caught the disease from him. He taught me how to watch it. And I still do. But you …”
“I’m not around any more.”
“Not for the last three seasons, at least.”
“Not for exactly the last three seasons.”
“Oh, Sam, I remember one fabulous Sunday afternoon you had. Was it the second year you played? Against the Redskins at Washington. I saw that one. You were into their backfield like a tiger.”
“I was really up for that one. And I was working a special deal with our right guard and the linebacker to get loose. I got mousetrapped a few times, but we’d figured on that. It wasn’t until the last quarter they came up with the right way to contain what we’d worked out.”
“Why did you quit when you were doing so well?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Sam. That’s a sort of good solid, durable name.”
“As in Sam Huff?”
“Do I have to kick you with my bad leg, or come back at you with the big broad hint all over again?”
“What time will I pick you up?”
“Are you going to feed me?”
“Miles and miles from here.”
“Like a little after six then?”
“I shall report on time, Margaret.”
“It didn’t come from Margaret. It just started as Peggy. And I am being shameless because I had just about the dullest vacation of my life last year when I came down here, and I wasn’t ever going to come back, except Char wrote such a lonely-sounding letter.”
Ack’s small car was gone when I walked back to his place. I put on my clothes, put his magpie shell in his mailbox, had breakfast and still got to the office at an average time for the summer months. Alice Jessup and Jennie Benjamin were breaking in a new girl, a temporary replacement, as Jennie explained firmly. The new one was very young, with a hippy rolling walk, a narrow swarthy face and a look of sullen insolence.
Her name was Mary May Frear. There are a lot of Frears in the area, and some of them are pretty trashy folk, and I had the feeling this wasn’t going to work out.
Bunny Biscoe came in to see me a little after eleven and we went across the street for coffee. When you look at him all you see is a huge nose, jug ears, an underlip stuck out like a shelf, and saucery pale blue eyes. These seem to take up all the room on his small head. His byline is the one that appears most frequently in the Florence City Ledger. He is a nice, perservering, stupid little guy who can get some of the simplest news stories so mixed up nobody can ever figure out exactly what happened.
He wanted to pump me about Sis, but I got more out of him than he got out of me. I learned they were now using borrowed helicopters in the hunt for the little black Renault, hoping to spot it on one of the little sandy roads that wind off into the empty land east of the city. T.C. Barley, the state’s attorney, was now taking an active interest in the case and more and more police talent was being brought in. A few reporters had come down from Sarasota, Tampa and St. Pete, and up from Fort Myers. Sheriff Pat Millhaus had been taped for a television news program out of Tampa.
The day seemed to drag along. I made an afternoon call in Osprey to appraise the damage on a sideswiped panel delivery truck, then went back to the office and inserted some new price lists on foreign car parts into my work books. By five o’clock I was standing—singing and scrubbing—in the shower when the phone rang.
“Sam? This is Peggy Varden.”
“You see, I even have a phone listed in my name.”
“I’m terribly sorry, but I have a little headache and I guess I’d better cancel it for tonight.” Her tone sounded very flat and formal and unfriendly.
“I could bring aspirin.”
“Thank you so much for asking me.”
“How about the same time tomorrow night?”
“Oh, my leg feels perfectly all right now, thank you.”
“I get it. Sorry to be so slow. If you can sneak out and still want to go out, give me a polite no answer.”
“No, I’m sorry. That won’t be possible.”
“If it has to be later than we planned, give me another no.”
“Thank you, but that won’t be possible either, Mr. Brice.”
“If you can get up the road to meet me on the beach in front of D. Ackley Bush’s house say something else about the leg.”
“No, I didn’t realize a cramp could be so painful.”
“I’ll do a slow count by half hours starting with six, and when I get to the right one, say good-by and hang up. Six, six-thirty, seven, seven-thirty, eight, eight-thirty, nine, nine-thirty, ten …”
“Thank you for asking me anyway. Good-by Sam.”
6
I was in no mood for conversation with Ack and the inevitable explanations, so I unhooked the chain across the Turner driveway and put my wagon in there, hidden in the black shadows of the tall casuarinas that were sighing in an east wind. I knew they were away until late September, and would have approved if given all the information.
After I had strolled down the beach I was in position at quarter to ten. After the booming thunderstorm at eight o’clock, the sky had cleared and the world smelled new. There was a half-moon silvering the beach, and enough phosphorescence so that I could see the quick streak of a questing fish from time to time. I sat in the moon shadow of a sea grape on a half-buried palm log. I saw her when she was a hundred yards away. She came swinging along in a balanced and rhythmic way that made my heart veer sideways and then steady back on course. When she was closer I stood up and moved into the moonlight. She carried her purse and shoes. She wore a dark strapless top, a full pale skirt.
She marched up to me and said, “I resent being turned into a sneak. I am not a creepy little kid. I am a twenty-five-year-old widow. I’ll make my own judgments on people and pick my own friends.”
“Whoa! I haven’t said a word.”
“You better take me to a fun place, Sam, and it better be a late night.”
“Don’t put your shoes on yet. There’s a little more walking.”
As I re-hooked the chain I decided on a place to go. It meant a fairly long ride, but it gave us a chance to talk. Sometimes you get the feeling that you can never get all the way talked out with one special person.
“They didn’t like the idea of your going out?”
“Not one little bit. Just like last year, except last year I didn’t even get a chance. They’re so damn strange about it. They have the lovely house and the beach and the pool and the servants and the boat, and they don’t want to go anywhere—or want anybody else to go. Because I’m a guest, Sam, I couldn’t actually blow up. I had to play the whole thing slightly cool. There was all the pressure about going out with somebody I hadn’t met in a proper way. And there being nobody in the whole area I could safely go out with, and nowhere to go if I did go out. So I made the call hoping you’d catch on they could hear me. And you did almost too well. You have the talent of a born sneak.”
“I notice you got out.”
“We’re both sneaks. I went into the yawning routine. Just as I figured, they moved from the living room television to their bedroom television after I went to bed. Thank God Charity had briefed me on their burglar alarm system. When any door or window is closed you better not open it again until you cut it off at a handy switch. And then when you close it again, it reactivates the alarm system. I went right out the front door, bold as brass.”
“They lead a very quiet life.”
“It’s a very odd life, Sam. I guess it’s what they want. But it seems—unhealthy to me. I couldn’t live like that. Few people could.”
“Is there any special reason for living like that?”
“I think it’s his choice, not hers. But she goes along with it. You see, I don’t really know her very well. That must sound strange to you.”
“You said she’s your half-sister.”
“Not even that, actually. Stepsister, but that’s such an ugly word. When her father married my mother, she was ten and I was one. I adjusted just fine, but I guess it made her feel like a displaced person. I know she ran away a couple of times, and when she was seventeen she ran away for good. That left me, as an eight-year-old, the eldest of three, and I liked that, so I was secretly glad she was gone. When Daddy finally located her she was married and singing in a club in Reno, and she wouldn’t come home and he couldn’t make her. She was lovely. She is still a very handsome woman.”
“She was married to this Weber?”
“Oh, no! He’s her third husband. The first one got a divorce, and I guess it was one of those messy ones, because he got full custody of their baby and she has never seen it since. Then she married a man who owned a nightclub in Las Vegas. After they were married a year, he was killed. I guess they thought she knew something about it, because they held her for a long time trying to find out from her who had killed her husband and why, but she didn’t tell them anything. I guess he left her quite a bit of money. She moved to Chicago and that must have been where she met Maurice. They were married about five years ago, I think, when she was about twenty-eight. I know absolutely nothing about him, except, of course, that he certainly has all the money he seems to need.
“She got in touch with me after they moved down here, about a year after Peter died. I had decided to stay on in Richmond. Peter and I had been happy there. You like places where you have been happy, even after the happiness stops. Peter’s uncle had given me a good job. There didn’t seem to be very much point in going back home to Dayton. I don’t know how she got my address, but she wrote to me saying she didn’t want to correspond with her father and please not to tell him where she was living. I … just got into the habit of corresponding with her. Last summer I came down, as I told you. It was weird. Never again, I told myself. And here I am again, just because, damn it, she sounded so crushed when I tried to beg off.”
“Glad you could make it,” I told her.
She hitched closer to me. “I think I am too, Sam.”
She told me about Peter Varden, about how they had married when they were too young—just seventeen and nineteen. Her people and Peter’s uncle had helped them out, so he could get his degree from Duke. By carrying a heavy work load he had graduated a month before turning twenty-one. He had gone into an insurance office in Richmond. He was doing quite well. When she was four months pregnant and they were in the midst of house hunting, they said he had fallen in the office and had been taken to the hospital. She learned he had slipped on a freshly waxed tile floor and hit his head on the corner of a desk. The blow had not fractured his skull, but it had ripped a vein. They operated to relieve the pressure of the hemorrhage. He had regained consciousness after the operation, but had gone quickly into coma and had lived a little over a week and then died.
“I was a mess, Sam. I just couldn’t cope. I went back to Dayton and lost the baby there, and I went right down to skin and bones. If somebody asked me what time it was, I’d burst into tears. If there was a sudden noise, I’d jump seven feet, screaming. It seemed like such a damn foolish way for a man like that to die.
“One day something changed inside me. As if something went click. I hadn’t been able to sleep, but suddenly I was able to go to bed and sleep. Lord, how I slept! Twenty hours at a stretch, take a long walk, eat like a lion and go right back to bed. I guess I had realized I had to go on living, finally. So I went back to Richmond. I went to work for John Pennwalter, Peter’s uncle. He has four expensive dress shops. Now I’m assistant manager of one of them. I work in all four, though. I do some modeling, and buy a lot of the sportswear for all four shops, plan sales and ads and write some copy. There’s always enough to do.”
“It sounds like a good thing for you to be doing, I guess.”
“In a sense, yes. But I don’t want to do it forever. The situation of being a widow hasn’t been the easiest thing in the world, Sam.”
“How come?”
“It was pretty sickening in the beginning. We’d had good friends, and the real good ones handled it just right, and they’re still friends. But some of the others! Ugh! I don’t have any illusions about myself, Sam. I’m better looking than the average gal. By nature I’m sort of frank and open and friendly, and too many times men seem to think that my manner is some kind of a sexual approach. The slimy ones gathered around after I went back to Richmond. They were married, of course. They put it in a lot of vague and fancy ways, but the general idea was that I’d turn into a nervous wreck if I was suddenly deprived of the privilege of going to bed with somebody, and they would be glad to take care of things, in a very discreet way. Damn it, I am a very moral kind of person. I resent being taken for a slut. And some friends suddenly stopped being friends. After the third or fourth mealy proposition I invented the right answer, ‘Sure’,” I would say. “ ‘Thanks a lot for thinking of me. But let’s bring your little wife into this while it’s still in the planning phase, so we won’t run into any conflict of schedules. One of us will take Monday, Wednesday and Friday and the other Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and we’ll all take Sunday off. Why don’t I phone her right now? I’m telling you, Sam, they look at you with what I guess is called mixed emotions.’ ”
Where Is Janice Gantry? Page 10
